The Only Constant is Change
by Dean Thomas L. Magnanti, Vol. 4, No. 3, May 2007
"The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope."
– Winston Churchill
We sometimes take the culture of the MIT School of Engineering—as embodied in a spirit of constant change, innovation, and leadership—for granted. Did this culture arise out of thin air, did some specific signature event spark it, or has the culture arisen gradually, over decades? By examining our roots, we might develop some understanding of these questions. In offering you a brief tour of our past, let me review various aspects of our history: our organizational evolution, the impact of our research and technologies, and our influence on engineering education—indeed even models of engineering education, broadly. Looking through the lens of these historical analyses, we might even develop some understanding of our future.
At the beginning: MIT
Let's start by looking at the original scope and plan of the Institute in late 1864. Back then, the Institute established a "general" or "popular course" as the first department. It comprised grounding in mathematics, physics, mechanics, chemistry, geology and mining. The second department had five so-called "courses of study," intended to serve as routes through MIT. This original educational architecture is how we came about calling our majors "courses" and our subjects "subjects," rather than courses, as at most other universities.
Of those five courses in the second department, three were clearly engineering: mechanical construction engineering, civil and topological engineering, and geology and mining. These all later became engineering departments. The original courses also included architecture, and what was called practical and technical chemistry. Engineering was part of MIT's fabric from the beginning. One of the guiding principles still serves us well today: an MIT education begins with a foundation in underlying sciences combined with more professionally oriented programs in engineering. The specific sciences and engineering would change over time, but the educational philosophy has remained in tact. One curious fact is that mechanical engineering began as Course 1 and civil engineering as Course 2. For some reason, they traded places within a few years. It's hard to imagine why and especially why mechanical engineering might relinquish the honor of being Course 1.
The School of Engineering: 75 years old and counting
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, MIT experienced a period of significant growth and evolution, but it wasn't until 1932 when we actually established "schools" at MIT rather than the various courses of study. Seventy-five years ago, in 1932, MIT formally founded the School of Engineering. At that time, the founding departments included two related to civil engineering: building engineering and construction engineering, as well as a department of business engineering and administration—the forerunner of the Sloan School. The other departments were electrical, mechanical, naval architecture and marine engineering (which later became ocean engineering), and mining and metallurgy (which eventually became metallurgy and then materials science). In addition to all these departments, a broad engineering program continued as well, something called general sciences and engineering.
What I've outlined as the structural profile of the School in 1932 would not have differed significantly from the engineering offerings at the turn of the 20th century. But things had changed by 1950. The course catalog from that year shows that we no longer had a building construction department; instead, we had a department of civil and sanitary engineering. Mining had become metallurgy. The School now had a department of economics and engineering, and a department of business engineering and administration (the Sloan School was just around the corner); and we had added aeronautical engineering, representing the evolution of an existing technology—air and space travel.
As an historical comparison, the School now has a biological engineering division (soon to become a department), an engineering systems division, and a department of nuclear science and engineering, none of which existed in 1950. Moreover, the content of most departments has changed significantly as illustrated by the fact that only two departments today (chemical and mechanical engineering) have the same names as those in 1950. And even though chemical engineering and mechanical engineering have the same names, their content is quite different. In 1950, chemical engineering focused quite heavily on petroleum engineering, as contrasted to today, with more emphasis on topics like molecular engineering. And part of today's mechanical engineering footprint, with topics like quantum computing, nanotechnology, and optics, would hardly have been recognized in 1950. Electrical engineering in 1950 concentrated on both small-scale transistors and large-scale computers, which were merging and evolving rapidly. Universities do change! (An interesting aside: we can however see precursors of our two divisions in Dean of Engineering Gordon Brown's essay of 1967 in which he argued for the creation of two activities: engineering living systems, now known as bioengineering, and a new urban systems laboratory, that is, a major systems-based activity.)
Around that time, a major shift in national priorities affected the directions of a number of our departments. The nation moved from the age of building infrastructure to the age of building products. Until the middle of the last century, many of the significant engineering projects in the United States had included building the electric power system, the national highway system, and other parts of the nation's infrastructure. Then the emphasis changed more to building products. And of course, the world was now entering the Space Age.
Stellar research and technological contributions
Any historical overview of the School of Engineering should recognize some of the signature events in MIT research laboratories that occurred in the mid- to late 20th century. The ServoMechanisms Laboratory led to the development of controls and servomechanisms and later became the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems (LIDS); the Radiation Laboratory was an enormous enterprise with far-reaching impact, fueling the development of modern, physics-based electrical engineering, communications and even computers. These were the first major laboratories of their kind in higher education in the United States. Project MAC in 1963 developed critical foundations for time-sharing and interactive computing. This was the forerunner of the Lab for Computer Science and eventually the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL).
Reflecting on the history of MIT, one can't help but acknowledge the extraordinary contributions the School has made to society. To name just a few of the technologies to which MIT has contributed or has created, we might include: steelmaking, gasoline production, high-speed photography, microwave radar, analog computers, magnetic core memory, the basis for CAD/CAM, a prototype of the Internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the inertial guidance system for moon landings, novel drug delivery (e.g., "pharmacy on a chip"), artificial skin, the process for creating ultra-thin films of superconducting materials, the computer timesharing system, internet protocols (TCP/IP), computer security . . . and, of course, many, many more.
National influences and education
Throughout its history, MIT has made exceptional contributions in education, including the creation of a variety of new courses of study, such as the first courses in electrical engineering and in aeronautical engineering; MIT even created entire new fields: chemical engineering, sanitary engineering, naval architecture, and marine engineering.
Government policy has, of course, had a major impact on MIT as well as on the nation's university system as a whole. An early milestone was the Morrill Act of 1862, establishing the nation's land grant agriculture and mechanics schools (A&M), including MIT. The GI Bill of 1944 was a milestone of U.S. higher education in the middle of the last century, opening the doors of higher education much more broadly across the nation. As result of the space race, the National Defense and Education Act (NDEA) of 1958 provided portable fellowships for graduate studies and attracted and supported large numbers of students in engineering and science. Later, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gave small enterprises and universities ownership and control of intellectual property that they had developed. All of these government policy initiatives have had a profound effect on MIT and higher education broadly.
A couple other major developments in the middle of the last century are worth noting: (1) the creation of the (engineering- and economics-based) analytic business schools: Case Western, the University of Chicago, and Sloan in the early 1950s; and (2) after World War II, the development of engineering science (with its origins at MIT).
MIT was an early proponent of industrial internship programs through the Chemical Engineering Practice School. MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) began nearly 40 years ago as the first of its kind in the country and has become the nation's largest. Some of our subjects, in particular 2.007 and 6.001, have served as national models for education in engineering, pioneering project-based instruction / robotics in mechanical engineering, and systems-based instruction in computer science.
The famous twenty-one-volume Radiation Laboratory series set the foundation for modern electronics and computers. MIT pioneered a reform of high school physics through the work of Jerrold Zacharias and his set of instructional materials. MIT contributed to national education with other foundational textbooks at the midpoint of the last century: Calculus and Analytical Geometry by Professor George B. Thomas, for example; and Economics: An Introductory Analysis by Nobel Laureate and Institute Professor Emeritus Paul A. Samuelson.
More recent contributions to education include Project Athena, which anticipated the enormous significance of interactive computing on campuses, the Singapore-MIT Alliance, the Cambridge-MIT Institute and OpenCourseWare. We have also pioneered programs at the interface of engineering and management, such as the Leaders for Manufacturing program, the first of that scale and significance in the United States, and the System Design and Management program.
Taking this long view of the School's history, I am struck by the rapidity with which we've made changes. I think we in the School move fast both programmatically and intellectually in part because technology moves so fast and so we have to move quickly just to keep up. As just one example, we created ten new degree programs in two years!
And the future?
I've often written in this forum about what the School of Engineering is currently doing: our mission of leadership through technical excellence and innovation, our big four 0's (bio-, nano-, info-, macro-), next generation technologies, educational innovations, and diversity. Since I'm often asked to speculate about the future, I thought I would ask our department heads what they see as some of the important directions for the coming years and decades. This is what they outlined:
- Understanding and working with complex systems will become critical, whether these are providing stable food supplies, clean water, health, energy, climate change, or handling epidemic diseases.
- This could be the century of the life sciences in engineering, with new focus areas in which the School will engage, and with potential effort in such fields as medical engineering in developing countries.
- Distributed computing devices will become increasingly important for sensing, diagnostics, and on-demand production. These will serve industrial, institutional, and personal uses as well, so that we might become a completely embedded information world with pervasive information.
- Human-machine boundaries will become more blurred, with, for example, nano-monitoring devices used for medical care.
- Moving from the larger world to our own School in the future, the boundaries between departments are also likely to become increasingly blurred.
What doesn't change, even in an environment of innovation
In our teaching, MIT engineering will continue to emphasize both the underlying fundamentals of the engineering sciences and developments in the profession. In our research, we will continue to address some of the most exciting and important problems of the day. And in our service to society, we will always be there to lend a hand. I am often asked to speculate about engineering generally and the MIT School of Engineering in particular. What does this next century hold? My response is that I am not smart enough to know. However, I am confident (perhaps even smart enough to know) that engineering will transform the world tomorrow just as it has in the past. And I am equally confident that in education, research, and service the School of Engineering at MIT will continue not only to excel at what it does but, even beyond that, to lead: to lead both the nation and the society at large, to lead in what we do, and to lead in creating leaders. In these ways, we serve the world.